XMOS To Launch Next Week

XMOS, the semiconductor industry’s most intriguing start-up, is expected to launch on Monday with a statement of its intentions, a description of its initial products and a compelling proposition for the consumer electronics industry.

XMOS’ intentions have attracted worldwide interest because its CTO is Professor David May FRS, the architect of the iconic parallel processing engine, the Inmos Transputer. Now Professor of Computer Science at Bristol University, May is reported to have developed a new parallel processing architecture which will take programmable logic into radically new realms in terms of cost, power, performance, and applications. Like Inmos, XMOS is based in Bristol. The area is home to other parallel processing companies, like PicoChip and ClearSpeed, which have inherited the multiprocessing expertise developed at Inmos, and have benefited in more direct ways, for instance May wrote the instruction set of the PicoChip array. CEO of XMOS is James Foster, the former managing director of Oxford Semiconductor. XMOS’ VP of marketing is ARM veteran Noel Hurley. The company has been in existence for two years.